Beau Jackson

So I’ve had some problems with the blog – couldn’t get logged in for a while, got that fixed.  Then the site (and Allena’s) went completely bonkers for a while.  Needed to call tech support for that one.  Turned out I had some permissions set wrong and PHP was *really* unhappy with that.

Then I got busy with some other projects.  We just wrapped up three websites, one was a re-write and the other two were moved to a new location (we’re web-host resellers now) with us and a shopping cart change.  If you’re interested in checking them out, they are:  Double J Indoor Arena, Johnson’s Telemetry, and Riata Leather.  Dominic did a lot of work on the Double J site – I’m VERY pleased with his work…it does a programming father’s heart proud to watch his son develope his geeky talents! :)

We also got the sheep sheared a few days ago – just in time for the snow :P.  We have a “sheep tent” built so that they can stay warm.  Sheep with lots of wool on can handle extremely cold weather just fine.  Freshly shorn sheep…not so much!

We have two new goat kids that were born about two weeks ago.  Their names are “Captain Morgan” and “Johnny Walker”.  This year we have an alcoholic naming theme…boys will be named after hard liquor, girls will be named after mixed drinks.  If you’ve got any favorite mixed drinks or other adult beverages…let me know, and you may just get a kid or lamb named after your favorite libation.

Anyhow, that’s why I haven’t posted recently…but that’s taken care of now too!

…it’s time for an update.

Christmas and New Year’s has come and gone, and things are getting back to normal around the ranch.  Several of the goats have been off at the breeder, and they are now home, along with a new addition to the goat herd named Bridget.  She’s due to kid around the end of the month, so baby season will be starting early this year.

Speaking of babies, Julianna (who we have taken to calling “Ju-Ju”) is almost seven months, and can crawl really really fast now.  She’s been taking pillaging lessons from her big brother William.  She’s been a dillegent student, and is now into everything she can get her little hands on.

Elizabeth is learning to read, and I think Teresa is trying to keep up with her, so she may end up learning to read early :)

Dominic has grown taller than his mother (sigh…he’s growing up).  He’s still got a way to go before he gets taller than me, but the day will probably come.

I managed to sprain my back falling down some icy stairs.  I have my fifth trip to the chiropractor today.  The good news is that I haven’t had any back spasms in almost 48 hours now…and they’ve been a constant for over two weeks.

So that’s the short version of recent history.  I’ll try to post a little more often now that I can again!

Seems like the last week has been busy around the ol’ homestead.

Last Saturday we butchered 100 chickens.  It was a looong day!  We had several other adults helping us as well (the James’ and the Johnson’s and some of the Johnson’s adult kids).  I think it took about 9 hours all together from start to finish.  Which is pretty slow really.  Robert (one of the Johnson’s) commented that we managed to process one bird per person per hour, which is true, but not an accurate reflection of our work.  Truth be told, I think we managed to process about 20 birds in the first two hours, then we took a lunch break for an hour, then we processed another 30 birds over the next three hours, and we processed the last 50 in about two hours.  In other words, we got faster at it.  The last hour was spent re-sealing some of the packaging.  We used a vacuum sealer (which worked very well overall) but some of them didn’t seal right because of liquid getting vacuumed up where the sealing was taking place.

I borrowed a chicken plucker from a guy I work with, which looks like this:

Jako Chicken Plucker

The inside of the barrel part looks like this:

plucker

The first picture is of the actual model plucker we used, the second just shows what the inside looks like.  The bottom plate spins around and all those little black rubber fingers strip the feathers from the bird.  You put in four birds, turn it on, and 30 seconds later pull out four birds without feathers.  Truly amazing!

Sunday night was the start of the sick kids.  William got up around 2:00am and threw up…and repeated that every 20-30 minutes until around 9:00am.  Ugh.  Not a lot of sleep that night.  My brain was mush, so I ended up taking Monday off to go get easy to digest foods, and to build some fence (which doesn’t take a lot of mental work).

Tuesday was goat delivery day.  Dominic and I drove four goats to Monett, MO for breeding.  Three of them we left there and will pick up in a few weeks.  The other was…er…”serviced”…while we waited.  Goats are NOT shy or hesitant.  Ahem.  Two and a half hour drive each way, and we left after work.  Got home around 11:30pm.  Thankfully, the kids took a break from being sick that night.

Wednesday saw the flu return to our house…Elizabeth was sick all day, and Teresa started getting sick in the evening and continued with that at regular intervals until about 3:00am.  Not a lot of sleep last night either.

Tonight I’ll be re-wiring our stock trailer so that the tail lights and turn signals work.  This is so that we can use it to transport some rams to Amsterdam, MO to swap some rams with the folks at Limpus Shetland Farm.  I may also butcher a sheep/lamb tonight (I just can’t bring myself to call an 18 month old sheep a “lamb”, but technically they are still considered “lamb” until they’re two years old).

Hopefully, nobody else will get sick.  Dominic, Julianna, Allena and I have managed to stay healthy so far, so we’ll just keep our fingers crossed on that one.

Earlier this week Allena lost her mind saw a bargain and jumped on it, to the tune of a couple of bottle calves.  So now we have two new additions to the ranch.  I think we’re going to name them “Rib Eye” and “Rump Roast”, which will give you an indication as to why they were purchased.  Actually, it was a pretty good deal and they should be reasonably innexpensive to bottle feed, since we have excess goat milk anyway.  Not enough to just feed them that, but enough to reduce the cost of milk replacer significantly.  These two guys were purchased from our friends the Wicks who keep some Shetland sheep like we do, but are primarily dairy farmers.

So yesterday we went over to pick them up, and while we were there a semi-load of hay showed up (early).  Dominic and I tagged along with Stefan to help unload.  Turns out these big round bales were destined to become silage.  Have you ever seen a field with something like this in it:

Silage

Well, that’s silage.  Silage is just hay that still has a lot of moisture in it.  By wrapping it up in plastic, that moisture causes the hay to ferment.  As I understand it, this fermented hay is more palatable (tastes better) to the animals, and actually has a higher nutritional content.  I had always wondered how they got them wrapped up.  Yesterday I got to help with that process.  We used a piece of equipment that looks like this:

Bale Wrapper

This is a bale wrapper, and I gotta say it’s a pretty neat piece of equipment.  As you can see in the picture, a tractor picks up an unwrapped bale and sticks it on end of the wrapper.  Then an hydrolic ram pushes it into the circular part which spins around the bale and wraps it in plastic film.  This kind makes long tubes of hay like in the first picture.  There are some that will wrap an individual bale so that they can be stacked – they end up looking like giant marshmallows.

After the hay was all wrapped up, we ordered some pizza and ate dinner with the Wicks.  Stefan asked if Dominic and I wanted to tag along while he milked, so we did.  Stefan milks about 90 head of cattle, and has a nice setup (in my opinion – not that I’ve seen many other dairy farms).  He’s set up to milk 10 cows at a time.  His parlor looks something like this (only not so big):

Milking Parlor

Ten cows come in on one side and you hook up the milkers.  These suck the milk out of the udders and deliver the milk straight to the holding tank.  While the first ten are getting milked, you bring another ten in on the other side.  As the first ten get finished, you move the milker to the cow on the other side of the aisle.  When all of the first ten are done, you let them out and bring another ten in to replace them and repeat the process.  It took about a while to milk 90 cows, but it sure was faster than milking them by hand would be! ;)

All in all an interesting day – I learned how to make silage and how to milk cows.

You can see pictures of the kitchen floor on her blog: http://thethreeringranch.com/allena/?p=355